Orlando Welcoming Gardens North Terminal Complex, Orlando International Airport, Orlando, Florida Terrazzo
My four designs are gardens. Welcoming gardens.
When I was selected as a finalist and visited the airport, we were told to reflect the greater Orlando area in the floors — but not Disney, not SeaWorld, not Universal. I understood the thinking. I disagreed with it. Orlando without its theme parks is like ignoring the fact that millions of people come here every year specifically for the joy of a rollercoaster. So I proposed a rollercoaster anyway. All four floors were accepted.
The concept began with a map. I wanted each floor to honestly reflect what exists outside the airport in that direction — not a generic celebration of Florida, but a specific response to the actual landscape, industry, and culture surrounding the terminal in each quadrant. Once I had defined what was unique to each direction, and thought about the beautiful climate, the gardens, the orchards, the extraordinary range of what central Florida holds, the garden idea became evident. A garden is always a place of welcome. A foretaste of what lies ahead.
I call these four floors the Wellness Garden, the Tech Garden, the Fun Garden, and the Star Garden — organized on the quadripartite layout of the four airside satellites in the North Terminal Complex, each one oriented to its own corner of central Florida.
The Wellness Garden
To the northwest of the airport lies some of the most beautiful horticultural landscape in Florida — Leu Gardens, the Mead Botanical Garden, the agricultural history of Orange County with its citrus orchards and orange blossom trails leading out toward Lake Apopka. Many of Orlando’s hospitals are in this direction as well. The Wellness Garden draws from all of it: oranges and orange blossoms, tropical flora, the organic rhythm of a landscape that has been cultivated and cared for. The colors glow with the richness of that history.
After the floors were installed, the airport sent me a video. Someone had chosen the Wellness Garden — among the orange blossoms — as the place to propose marriage. The proposal was accepted. I have thought about that more than once. It is what you hope for when you make something for a public space: that it becomes the place someone chooses for the moment that changes the direction of two lives.
The Tech Garden
To the east runs the Florida High Tech Corridor — twenty-three counties, anchored by the University of Central Florida, the Central Florida Research Park, and research initiatives in advanced manufacturing and next-generation smart systems. This garden speaks that language. Circos diagrams — a form of visualization used in comparative genetic mapping to show complex relationships graphically — appear in the composition alongside forms suggesting nanoparticles and orbicular shapes that reference high-tech manufacturing. Deep blues, magentas, and black epoxy form a rich backdrop, sprinkled with mirror, silver-coated aggregates, mother-of-pearl shell, and glass that glimmer like a field of stars at night.
The Fun Garden
This floor plays. The circular forms of the gardens spiral outward in fractal, fern-like, rollercoaster-like shapes — cobalt blue at the center resonating as sky and water against the orange of the spiraling forms. The purple coaster tracks come from the Mako at SeaWorld — Orlando’s tallest, fastest, and longest roller coaster at the time. I went to SeaWorld as a kid. It belongs here.
You can measure the success of a design by the ways people interact with it. This is a floor where I can imagine children following the spirals to their centers, spinning around, and spinning back out again in a kind of joyous terrazzo hopscotch.
The Star Garden
Merritt Island lies to the east of Orlando International Airport. Kennedy Space Center. Cape Canaveral. I went there as a kid too, and I built and flew model rockets — Estes kits mostly, and I would send my own designs in to their contests and occasionally win free rockets. The Star Garden is personal in that way.
The floor contains numerous constellations, including the Gemini twins, which evoke the Gemini program. A view of the bottom of the Mercury capsule anchors the center. The checkerboard pattern from the Mercury Redstone booster appears in the composition. The Space Shuttle is shown in elevation — a tribute to Orlando International Airport’s role as a secondary landing site for shuttle flights. Brass divider strip runs throughout, warm against the deep blues, purples, and black terrazzo. Mirror, coated silver, mother-of-pearl, and glass pieces reflect the surrounding light and sparkle like stars in a sea at night.
These four floors are meant to do what terrazzo in an airport should do: give people a foretaste of what they are about to experience, build a sense of anticipation, connect the traveler to the place they are entering or leaving. Central Florida is extraordinary in its range — gardens and orchards, high-tech research corridors, the pure joy of a theme park, and rockets rising from the coast into space. All of it is here, underfoot, waiting to be discovered.
